Both as an intermediary to Western culture and as a cultural force in itself, Japan had a significant impact on the development of modern Chinese literature. However, for the most part, the links of this Sino-Japanese literary relationship has only just begun to receive scholarly attention, making this book's exploration of Japan's role in shaping Chinese cultural modernity an important addition to the literature. By comparing and contrasting what appear to be similar narrative modes between the shishosetsu and work coming out of the Creation Society, Keaveney explores how Chinese writers both appropriated and reconceptualized this Japanese approach. By letting their work retain both self-referentiality and articulations of social concerns, the Chinese authors were able to make the form far more political than it ever was in the hands of Japanese writers.

An examination of whether Chinese writers of the Creation Society, a Chinese literary coterie, successfully appropriated shishosetsu, a quintessentially Japanese form of autobiographical narrative, into a form to be exploited for their own ends, especially political ends.